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Friday, April 20, 2018

Films for the Trump Years: Bowling for Columbine

There
was about a 36-hour period, starting quite suddenly about two days after the Parkland
shooting, where I found myself filled with such a raging fury I could barely
breath.I thought Sandy Hook and the
utter refusal of Republicans to allow a proper response to the slaughter of
children had killed off my ability to get emotional about this particular
topic.Somehow, miraculously, I was
wrong; I am not yet so jaded.But that
doesn’t make the suffering of these victims any more bearable.

Like
everyone, I expected the usual rinse-wash-repeat cycle to happen as it
inevitably had for these past twenty, interminable years.But this time, so far, it hasn’t.The survivors of Parkland, linking arms with
past victims across the country, have been able to push back against the cycle
and seem to be on the verge of breaking it (although we’ll have to wait until
after the midterms to determine if it really is broken, or just strained).An unprecedented public focus has been sharpened on gun violence, enhanced
by a school walkout last month and the monumental March for our Lives in D.C.

Today,
on the 19th anniversary of Columbine, a second school walkout,
expected to be even more expansion than last month’s, will take place, and I
feel there is nothing more appropriate I could do this month with my Trump Years series than couple today’s walkout with a look back at Michael Moore’s
seminal work, Bowling for Columbine,
which remains his most well-known and potent film.

The
combination of seeing this film for the first time and reading Moore’s book, Stupid White Men, in the summer of 2004,
as that year’s election was heating up, was a pivotal moment in my life.The boldest passages from the book and the
most provocative parts of the film were like lightning bolts to my brain,
jolting my intellect into an alertness I have worked tirelessly to maintain
ever since.

Now,
of course, as a 28-year-old adult seeing the film again for the first time in
at least a decade, it’s much easier for me to see when and where the clear
flaws in Moore’s in-your-face narrative style pop up, as well as his occasional
weakness for over-simplifications that often hurt, rather than help, his
arguments.There was always a bit of the
juvenile in many of his antics, something that has only slightly mellowed in
his later works.I will never forget the
chill that ran down my spine the first time I saw the “Wonderful World” montage, but with over a decade of studying history now behind me, I can clearly
see the many cracks in that kind of sensationalist approach.

However,
while it is fair to criticize him for the times he overreaches, if he wasn’t as
balls-to-the-wall daring as he is, he would never reach nearly as many moments
of painful clarity as he does, which are the hallmarks of great documentary
filmmaking.Yes, the movie’s flaws are
more salient than ever 16 years after it took Cannes by storm and netted Moore
his Oscar.But its most powerful
moments, and its clearest damnations of the American psychosis surrounding guns, are even more so, and have never been more relevant than now; Moore
highlighted a ream of uncomfortable truths and problems within America that
have only worsened since the film’s release.

The
recurring topic of fear, and how it can be and is used to manipulate people, is
central to the movie, but while Moore seemed to believe then that those first
few years after 9/11 were the apogee of American fear, we now know all too
clearly it was merely a paltry prelude to what was to come, the first stirrings
of a darkness in the American mind that has now lasted nearly two decades.

Moore
and his cinematographers have always had a special talent for capturing images,
moments, and exchanges that perfectly encapsulate the paradoxes and
contradictions of the American character, and Bowling for Columbine is chock-full of them.A guy buying guns “just to be safe” wearing a
“Fuck You” baseball cap.An employer of
Lockhead Martin standing in front of a massive, uncompleted missile from the US
nuclear arsenal opining how you can’t just shoot or bomb someone every time you
get upset.Two survivors of Columbine
going to the headquarters of K-Mart to try and return the bullets, purchased at
a K-Mart store, still inside their bodies.And my personal favorite; a conspiracy theorist, after showing off the
loaded gun he sleeps with and talking about his friendship with the Oklahoma
City bombers of 1995, admits that SOME materials, like weapons-grade plutonium,
should not be in civilian hands, because, quote, “there’s wackos out there.”

Then
there’s the racial aspect that the film sometimes, but not always, touches on;
both then and now, it’s inevitably white people extolling the virtues of
firearms and of uncontrolled private gun ownership.It’s whites who, according to the Hestons and
LaPierres of the world, that have the God-given right to stroll around with
loaded assault rifles at the ready, while anyone black, brown, or otherwise only
has the right to die, whether or not they had a firearm on them.These people claim universality for their
twisted, perverted worldview, but it’s merely window dressing for old-school,
boilerplate racism.And we keep letting
ourselves forget that, time and again.

It’s
amazing how much the film now works as a time capsule of those last few,
precious years where school shootings were still rare enough to spark genuine
outrage and sadness, not apathy and resignation.When the 90’s were dying, yes, but still had
a few breaths left in them.When “Columbine”
was a singular event with a singular meaning in the English language.There was no talk of “like Columbine” or “since
Columbine.”Just “Columbine.”

From
the speeches Moore shows in Littletown in 1999 to the March for our Lives just
last month, the parallels are chilling and at times overwhelming, as is any
serious effort to understand just exactly how much two decades of inaction have
cost us.A recent Washington Post study, an absolute must-read, estimates that nearly 200,000 current and former
US students have been exposed to gun violence and struggle with the various
after-effects and traumas associated with being a survivor.What that has cost us as a nation and as
people is beyond money, beyond numbers, beyond quantification, and above all
else, beyond excuse.

We
are, each and every one of us, complicit in this senseless slaughter.We can all choose to be part of the solution.But it requires our active choice, today,
tomorrow, and forever.